August 11, 2026

TechCrunch Top 3

Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app: Over a year following its post-election surge, Bluesky’s mobile app is seeing a continued decline in active users, though its remaining community is still relatively engaged. Read More

Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's longtime COO, is leaving to 'start something new': One of OpenAI's longest-serving executives is headed out the door, although the longtime COO told staff that he was "excited to help you all advance the mission from a different vantage point." Read More

General Catalyst leads $1.1B round into 2-month-old River AI: River AI, a startup founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, has a fascinating vision for personal agents and secured $1.1 billion out of the gate. Read More

A message from Alumni Ventures

Invest in High-Potential Startups Like These

Alumni Ventures' startup highlights, including Groq, Sleeper, and Replit

Alumni Ventures is giving readers early access to high-potential startup opportunities across today’s most active sectors, co-invested alongside name-brand VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Bessemer, & Y Combinator. You Get: Curated deal flow of high-potential startups, Investing alongside name-brand vc firms, No cost to see deals, No obligation to invest.

See Current Deals

Afternoon Must-Reads

Delta investigating after someone set up fake Wi-Fi network mid-flight: The Delta flight crew switched off the aircraft's legitimate Wi-Fi network for around 30 minutes due to the incident, according to a spokesperson. Read More

Anthropic says it will watermark text generated by its AI models: Anthropic will extend support for watermarking AI generations for older models as well. Read More

Uber surprised robotics company Serve by selling its entire stake: The divesture comes as the two once-tight companies have started to diverge on the business side. Read More

Google’s Gemini app surges to one billion users: Gemini is keeping pace with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which hit 1 billion monthly active users back in June. Read More

An unreleased Anthropic model made progress on one of math's biggest unsolved problems: For more than 150 years, the Riemann hypothesis has stood as one of the major unsolved problems in mathematics. Anthropic hasn't solved it — but the company's models made more progress than you might expect. Read More

Last but Not Least

North Korean remote IT staffer worked for US government agency, says FBI: The investigation shows that North Koreans are able to infiltrate government agencies, as well as private organizations and crypto exchanges. Read More

Check out some of our other newsletters:

StrictlyVC

TechCrunch Events

TechCrunch Mobility

Want to adjust your daily newsletter schedule? You can do it right here

Got a tip?
Get in touch securely.

Want to advertise on TechCrunch?

Has this been forwarded to you? Click here to subscribe to this newsletter.

Unsubscribe

Member Center

501 2nd Street, Suite 650, San Francisco, CA 94107